Tycho - data gather for Species

Tycho Brahe

Tycho Brahe was a Danish nobleman who measured the heavens with remarkable accuracy. He generated extremely accurate startcharts, amassed a 3000-book library, printed his own books, and thought himself equal of kings. His palace, Uraniborg on the isle of Hven (Ven in modern Sweden), was the centre for astromy in his time. Falling from grace with the young Danish king he fled to Prague and the court of Rudolph. Here he collaborated, awkwardly at first, with a young Johannes Kepler who kept his closely guarded startcharts when Tycho died. Tycho's legacy is these starcharts which provided the raw data for Kepler's fantastic discoveries and which Kepler eventually published.

Introduction

Usage

To generate the exec trail datafiles:

tycho [params] warrior1.rc warrior2.rc [.. warriorn.rc]

(where params are the standard pmars/exhaust switches for coresize, processes etc; -d 100 is recommended.) This will print a report to standard output in html format, which you might want to redirect to a file for future reference.

To validate the exec trail datafiles:

exstat warrior1.rc.ex [.. warriorn.rc.ex]

This will print a report to standard output in html format, which you might want to redirect to a file for future reference and for comparision to the similiar report from tycho.

Download

Tycho is currently only in CVS; to download use:

cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/redcoder checkout tycho

File format

each processed .rc file gets a corresponding .rc.ex file. This file has the following format:

.EX file format
===============
Will 'Varfar', (c) 2003

--------------------
unsigned int   id; // a number for this warrior; 0-based
battle_t       0;
....
battle_t       n;
--------------------

where battle_t is:

--------------------
unsigned int   enemy_id; // who was this fight against?
unsigned int   len; // how many opcodes are there?
block_t        0;
...
block_t        n;
--------------------


where block_t is:

--------------------
unsigned int   len; // how maybe bytes
byte           0;
...
byte           n;
--------------------

where the bytes in block_t decompress to form n bytes of opmod_ts.

There are as many blocks as necessary to store battle_t.len opmod_ts.

where opmod_t is:

--------------------
unsigned char  opmod; // packed with _OP(op,mod) from Exhaust: insn.h
--------------------

Exstat makes a good skeleton for an iterative analyser.

Compression

Exec trails are extremely long; billions of opcodes takes billions of bytes to store. Fortunately, this data is extremely repeatitive, and therefore ideal for compressing. Tycho uses zlib for compressing exec trails on the fly. Typically this leads to a 97% improvement! Fantastic!

Sorry to anyone on Windows who might have problems setting up a zlib for msys or whatever.

Notes

Tycho uses unsigned long long datatypes for large variables. This works fine with GCC, but is not exactly a standard c datatype, and other compilers may complain.